Internet radio is a broadcasting service transmitted via the Internet. Many internet radio stations are completely independent from traditional (“terrestrial”) radio stations, and broadcast only on the Internet, which is usually referred to as streaming.
Examples of conventional Internet radio services include Pandora and YAHOO Launchcast Radio. Pandora is an Internet radio service that takes a seed song entered by a user and creates a customized radio station. The user can influence, but not control, the station by rating the songs that are suggested. The service operates under the compulsory license for Internet radio.
Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio is a streaming music service that allows users to create their own customized radio station tailored to their tastes. Users can rate artists and albums highly to hear them often and ban the ones they dislike. Users can also listen to a collection of more than 130 pre-programmed radio stations created by YAHOO! editorial staff. YAHOO! also offers a Music LAUNCHcast plugin for Yahoo! Instant Messenger (text messaging service). This plugin lets a user's buddies see what the user is currently listening to via LAUNCHcast Radio. The plugin also allows the user's friends to tune into the radio station so that they can listen to the music as well.
Thus, conventional Internet radio services may provide approaches for creating customized radio stations for a particular user that is based on input from that user (e.g., Pandora), or that influenced by a friend of the user (e.g., Yahoo!), but conventional Internet radio services fail to consider peer group influences. For example, the music that a particular teenager listens to may be highly influenced by the music listened to by a group of the teenager's peers, such as his or her friends.
In addition, the costs of starting and operating an Internet radio service can be significant. One significant cost is the cost to build and maintain the content repository of songs the Internet radio service intends to play. Typically, the content repository is populated by buying or otherwise licensing the rights to all the songs the station intends to offer, which could number in the millions. One problem with this is that many of the songs in the content repository may never be played, with much of the costs directed to incorporating new songs and/or one-of-a-kind songs that may turn out to have very limited audiences.
Another component of the costs to maintain the Internet radio service includes the royalties payable to performers of recorded works broadcast on the internet, which continue to increase. The rates currently include a minimum fee of $500 (U.S.) per year, per channel, with escalating fees for each song played. Since the inception of rates in 1998, webcasters have been charged on a per performance basis. For 2006 the applicable fee would be $0.0008 per performance. A performance is defined as streaming one song to one listener. A webcaster with 10,000 listeners would therefore pay 10,000 times the going rate for every streamed song. The fee increases in increments each year, which amounts to $0.0019 per song by 2010. If enforced, this decision could undermine the business models of many Internet radio stations, which had previously relied on the rate of $0.000768 per song that had been unchanged from 1998-2005.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved method and system for populating the content repository of a media service, such as an Internet radio service, and for playback of the content.